Dr Clare Ní Cheallaigh is a literary scholar and Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. Her work brings together African literature, oral storytelling, publishing history, decolonial scholarship and the study of how knowledge is produced and circulated across different languages and cultural traditions.

She completed her doctorate in 2025 at UCD’s School of English, Drama and Film. Her thesis, Orality and Authorship: African Storyteller-Authors in the Literary Marketplace, 1938–2024, examines African writers whose work emerges from both oral storytelling traditions and written literary culture, and the ways in which they negotiate the sometimes competing expectations of these two systems. The study opens with an examination of the work of the pioneering Yoruba-language novelist D. O. Fágúnwà.

Dr Ní Cheallaigh holds a Master of Studies in World Literature from the University of Oxford. Before beginning her doctoral research, she worked as a Media Assistant at The National Archives in Kew, London. A fluent Irish speaker, she brings to her research a particular understanding of the cultural importance of indigenous languages, oral traditions and the institutions through which literature is preserved and transmitted.

Her scholarship extends across several African literary traditions. Her published research includes a study of mobility, mythology and oral storytelling in the novels of Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. She has also presented research on Amos Tutuola at the University of Oxford and delivered a paper on Fágúnwà at the Annual Conference of the African Literature Association.

In April 2024, Dr Ní Cheallaigh organised Exchanging Tales: Celebrating Irish and Nigerian Storytelling through D. O. Fágúnwà and Peig Sayers at the Museum of Literature Ireland. The event brought two major indigenous-language storytelling traditions into conversation through readings, performances and discussions involving Diipo Fágúnwà, Irish writer and scholar Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and performers Dagogo Hart and Samuel Yakura of WeAreGriot.

She is presently a researcher on the European Research Council-funded SCRiBe Project—Sustainable and Collaborative Research Information for Bibliodiverse Ecosystems: A Transnational Study. Her contribution examines how the idea of “open” access is understood within African research movements and infrastructures, as part of a broader enquiry into the relationships among publishing standards, geopolitics and global knowledge flows.

Her continuing commitment to African languages and publishing is further reflected in her role as co-organiser of Practices of Linguistic Decolonisation: African Languages and Publishing Infrastructures, a symposium to be hosted at University College Dublin in 2027.

As a member of the Organizing Suite of the African Heritage Festival London, Dr Clare Ní Cheallaigh brings distinguished scholarly knowledge of African literature, indigenous-language storytelling and international publishing systems. Her involvement is especially significant to the Festival’s celebration of D. O. Fágúnwà and its wider mission to create meaningful encounters between African cultural traditions and those of other parts of the world.